The mental health crisis among children didn't appear from nowhere. According to psychoanalyst Erica Komisar, LCSW, we engineered it through 75 years of progressively devaluing the one thing infants need most: their mothers.

In a conversation that challenges fundamental assumptions about modern life, Erica Komisar joins Dr. Johann D'Souza of Virtuous Leaders Podcast to examine the neuroscience of attachment, the cultural forces that separate mothers from babies, and the "forever shadow" cast by those early separations. Her clinical experience and research paint a picture both devastating and hopeful - devastating in revealing what we've done, hopeful in showing the path forward.

5 Transformative Insights from Erica Komisar

• Infants are born neurologically incomplete, with mothers serving as their central nervous system
• How feminism's message shifted from expanding choices to devaluing motherhood
• Why early separation creates permanent changes in children's stress response systems
• Depression after birth often reveals unresolved attachment wounds from one's own childhood
• Why we're the only developed nation treating children as accessories to adult lives

Timestamps:

00:00 – Meeting Erica Komisar: Psychoanalyst, Author, Advocate

00:14 – Two Books, Two Critical Periods: 0-3 and Adolescence

01:17 – The Devastating Truth About Western Mothering Culture

01:30 – How Feminism's Extremism Betrayed Children

05:50 – The Marsupial Model: Why Humans Need Extended Nurturing

07:41 – Projecting Independence Onto Helpless Infants

09:53 – The Cliff Everyone's Jumping Off Together

11:10 – Is Early Daycare Actually Child Abuse?

14:26 – Generational Transmission of Attachment Disorders

16:53 – Why America Fails Mothers Worse Than Any Nation

19:04 – When Maternal Instinct Meets Economic Pressure

23:33 – Childbirth Opens the Door to Your Own Childhood

25:43 – Beyond Pills: What Postpartum Depression Really Needs

28:46 – Living in a Dystopia of Superficial Solutions

29:33 – The Vision: Valuing What Actually Matters